Dark Days (Book 1): Collapse

by Lukens, Mark

  All hope drained out of Ray, and he was beginning to feel weak and light-headed. He’d kept the neck of his shirt over his mouth and nose the whole time he’d been in the garage, but maybe it hadn’t been enough protection from the fumes. Maybe the open windows weren’t even enough right now. He felt a jolt of energy and knew he needed to get out of the garage. He didn’t want to pass out in here and have his son find him a few feet away from the dead dog.

  Ray didn’t close the windows—he would come back later to do that. He didn’t look for spare wood or nails; he just needed to get out of here.

  Once he was back in the laundry room, he shut the door to the garage and locked it. He lowered his shirt and took a tentative breath. He felt a little better, but still a little weak and light-headed.

  Maybe he needed to drink some more water, eat some more food. He was sure he hadn’t eaten enough in the last few days.

  He went back into the kitchen, then to the doorway that led down to the basement.

  CHAPTER 37

  Mike was awake and eating a can of fruit. Ray joined him for breakfast, and he and Emma shared a can of corned beef hash and a pudding each.

  “Did you get the doors secure?” Emma asked, staring at Ray in the way that made him feel like she could see him.

  “Uh . . . no. I didn’t know if Mike was awake yet. I didn’t want to make too much noise.”

  “I can help you, Dad.”

  “Maybe later,” Ray told Mike. He looked at Emma again. “I went into the garage to look for some tools, maybe a hammer and some nails. Some spare wood.”

  Emma kept “looking” at him and gave him a slight nod.

  She knew, Ray thought. Somehow she knew that Craig and his family were in there. She’d told him to be careful—he remembered that now.

  Ray took a deep breath. He wanted to keep what he’d found in the garage a secret, especially from Mike, but then he wondered why he should. Mike had seen horrors beyond belief already—he’d seen people turn into rippers, people attacking other people, trying to attack them and rip them apart. Mike knew his mother had died. He’d seen his sister turn and watched her join a horde of rippers as they drove away.

  Mike was only a boy, but he was going to have to get used to this world that they lived in now. Shielding him like he was still a child wasn’t going to help. Ray wished he could still shield Mike, but he knew he couldn’t anymore. Besides, he didn’t want Mike somehow wandering into the garage by himself and find Craig and his family in the car.

  “I . . . I found something in the garage,” Ray said.

  Mike’s eyes lit up. “What?”

  Emma didn’t say anything—she just seemed to be bracing herself.

  “It’s not something good.”

  Mike’s face dropped, and he was suddenly tense.

  “Craig and his family, they’re in a car. They . . . they must’ve killed themselves.”

  “How?” Mike asked.

  “Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Ray said.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you run a car in the garage for too long, the fumes from the exhaust can build up inside and kill you,” Ray told him.

  “Why did they do that?” Mike asked. He hadn’t taken another bite of his food. He didn’t seem hungry anymore.

  Ray shrugged. “I don’t know, son.” It was a lie, but he didn’t want to go into his theories that both girls had turned into rippers or were beginning to turn. He didn’t want to tell Mike that Craig had tied up his family before putting them in the car. He didn’t want to tell Mike that Craig’s dog died right along with them beside the car. “I don’t want you going in there. You understand?”

  Mike nodded.

  “I mean it, Mike.”

  “Okay,” Mike said.

  “I want you two to stay down here for a little while.” Ray told Mike as he stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Mike looked suddenly agitated and nervous.

  “I’m just going upstairs for a little while to make sure everything’s secure up there,” Ray said, still looking right at Mike. “Okay?”

  Mike nodded, already sulking a little.

  “There’s plenty to do down here,” Ray told him. He glanced over at the pool table. “You could shoot some pool.”

  “I don’t know how to shoot pool.”

  Ray smiled. “I’ll show you later. We’ll play a few games.” That seemed to brighten Mike up a little.

  “There’s a whole bookshelf of toys and books down here,” Ray said. “Card games. Board games.”

  Mike still didn’t say anything.

  Ray could read Mike’s expression: What was he going to do down here with a blind woman?

  “I just want you to stay down here with Emma. Okay? Will you do that for me, please?”

  Mike finally nodded.

  “I shouldn’t be too long. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  *

  An hour later Ray sat at Craig’s desk, looking through folder after folder of papers. There were more loose papers stacked up in piles on the floor. When he’d first gotten in the office, he had opened up the laptop computer. The screen lit up and Ray was amazed that the battery still had some life left—Forty-eight percent battery left according to the little icon up in the corner. But the computer was password protected, and Ray couldn’t get anywhere with it. He had tried a few common passwords and then variations of the words roses and Avalon, but nothing worked. Maybe Craig had the password written down in one of these notebooks or folders.

  After stacking a lot of the loose papers into piles, Ray went through the drawers in Craig’s desk. He leafed through old address books. He didn’t find anything that resembled a password. There were small boxes and envelopes of receipts, computer printouts, their home financial records, investment reports.

  In a bottom drawer Ray found CDC auditing reports and financial statements and payroll records. There were many more of these reports in the dozens of folders on the floor. Ray was familiar with most of the paperwork, and there was nothing in any of the reports about diseases or the plague that was wrecking the world right now.

  Ray closed the folder he had in his hands and set it down in the “already gone through” pile. He picked up another folder and set it down on the desk. There were newspaper clippings and papers printed from internet articles inside, all of them detailing seemingly random acts of violence around the world in the last few weeks. At first the reports were scattered, a lot of violence blamed on the collapsing world economy, but in the last week it had become undeniable that large amounts of people were killing each other, some of them eating their victims. From what Ray could tell from the articles, the plague had swept across the world slowly at first, beginning around a month or so ago. There were isolated cases here and there at first, but then the plague had grown exponentially.

  He sat back in the office chair, leaning back a little. He still had many more stacks of folders to go through, but he could already tell that the answers to this plague were not going to be in those folders. Those articles were the closest thing he’d gotten to any kind of an answer. There had been no mention of roses or Avalon anywhere in any reports he’d read so far.

  The thought that Craig had been in the beginning stages of turning when he’d called a few days ago occurred to Ray again. What he’d heard on the cell phone two days ago had just been the ramblings of a sick man, random words and images that had popped up into Craig’s failing brain, random words uttered into the phone between the static.

  What was he doing here? How long could they stay here at Craig’s house? And if they were going to leave, then when? And where would they go?

  He felt that sense of panic growing in him again, that helplessness ballooning, overwhelming him. But he needed to fight it.

  “We’ll survive somehow,” he whispered to the empty office. “I don’t know how yet, but we’ll survive.”

  He closed his eyes, thinking for a moment.

  Where could they
go?

  And then he remembered Doug at work. Last Friday morning, when everything had finally collapsed, Doug had given him a map to his bugout property in West Virginia. He still had the piece of paper in his wallet that Doug had given him. Maybe they could go there. West Virginia wasn’t too far away.

  But it would still be a dangerous trip, and Ray wasn’t too excited about the idea of driving around again, exposed to the rippers in their vehicle.

  Suddenly restless, Ray felt like getting up and moving around. He abandoned the rest of the folders and envelopes. Maybe he should search Craig’s house for something useful, like a gun. Ray didn’t know how to use a gun, he’d never even shot one before, but he was sure he could teach himself. He also needed to go back to the garage and close those windows. He was pretty certain the fumes would be gone by now. He also needed to look for some tools while he was in there, at least a hammer and some nails so he could nail the doors and windows shut. There was still a lot to do, and sitting here poring over CDC financial reports wasn’t helping anything.

  Ray stood up from the chair and placed the last folder he’d gone through on top of the stack of folders on the floor. He looked down at the pile for a moment, thinking of those articles he’d read about cases of violence around the world. Something seemed strange about it, something tugging at his mind.

  But he wasn’t sure what it was, and it was time to get some things done around here before it got dark again.

  He was just about to walk away from the desk, but then he stopped, frozen for a second as he stared at the wall.

  The answer had just come to him.

  CHAPTER 38

  Mike shot pool. He’d been playing for an hour now. His dad had told him that he would teach him later and that they could shoot a few games, but Dad was still upstairs.

  He looked over at Emma who sat on the couch. He was bored of sinking the balls into the pockets on the table, so he walked over to Emma and sat down on the other couch, staring at her. She was a pretty lady (although not as pretty as his mom was), and she was still kind of young.

  “Want to play pool with me?” he asked her.

  She smiled at him. “You’d probably win the game.”

  He smiled back at her even though she couldn’t see him. “I could tell you where to shoot.”

  “You go ahead,” she told him.

  He sighed. “What did you used to do? I mean for fun.” He really couldn’t imagine what a blind person did all day.

  “Well, I used to listen to the TV. Listen to the radio. I love music.” She paused for a moment, smiling like she was remembering some of the songs she used to listen to. “And I used to listen to books.”

  “Listen to books?”

  “Audiobooks. Someone reads a book and records it.”

  Mike remembered his mom listening to something like that in the car, but only once because he and Vanessa wouldn’t shut up long enough for her to listen to it. She never listened to another book in the car after that. Maybe she listened to them when he and Vanessa weren’t in the car with her. A twinge of sadness struck him. He wished he would’ve let her listen to her book that day. He wished a lot of things now.

  “Can’t listen to books anymore,” Emma said. “No electricity now.”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed, the word coming out as a sigh.

  “But I used to do a lot of other things,” Emma said. “I cleaned my apartment. I cooked for myself. I used to take the bus and go to a blind center where I volunteered to help other people who were losing their sight. My mom used to take me shopping sometimes.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “She’s gone now,” Emma told him.

  Mike didn’t ask how Emma’s mom had died. He didn’t want to think about it; thinking about it made him think about his own mother and sister.

  He tried to think of something else. “I couldn’t handle being blind,” he told her. And it was the truth. He was already afraid of the dark, and the thought of being trapped in darkness forever made his skin crawl.

  “You never know what you can handle. I never thought I’d be able to handle it, but we’re all a lot stronger and tougher than we think we are.”

  “Didn’t you say before that you weren’t always blind?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I had a genetic disorder. It’s a long and complicated story. I started losing my sight when I was about six years old. The doctors did a few operations. They tried some medications. But it was all a longshot. They tried their best, but eventually, two years later, I couldn’t see at all.”

  Mike didn’t know what to say to that, and he really didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He got up and looked around the room. He’d already looked through everything already. There were toys and board games in the little room that looked like a closet, but they were all girls’ toys.

  He knew what he really wanted to do; it had been tugging at him for a while now, ever since his dad had told them about Craig and his family in the garage. Mike wasn’t sure why he wanted to see them, but he just wanted to. He felt like he needed to.

  Emma had curled up at the end of the couch, the blanket pulled over her. She looked so small under the covers. She looked like she was sleeping, breathing heavily.

  Mike watched her for a long moment, and then he walked back towards the pool table, then towards the stairs. At least the carpeting covered the sound of his footsteps.

  A moment later he was at the foot of the stairs. He looked back at the couches, but Emma hadn’t moved—he couldn’t even see her head from all the way over here. He knew he was disobeying his father’s orders, but he couldn’t help himself. It had to be safe upstairs or Dad would’ve come back down by now.

  Mike took the first step, then the next one up the stairs. He was afraid Emma was going to call his name like she knew what he was doing. She was nice, but she was also weird in a way. It was like she knew things about people, like she could “see” certain things even though she was blind. Psychic ability, that’s what it was called. Like reading minds and seeing into the future, he guessed. He was both intrigued and frightened at the idea of it.

  He was halfway up the basement steps now. He had the flashlight his dad had given him last night in his front pants pocket. He took the next step; it creaked just a little, but Emma never sat up or said anything. For some reason Mike couldn’t explain, he was sure Emma was awake and he was sure she knew where he was going and what he wanted to see. The idea of wanting to see dead people embarrassed him, but it was a pull he found hard to resist right now. He’d already seen a dead person—the ripper his father had killed with the golf club. He’d also seen dead rippers littering the streets on their drive here—rippers run over, rippers shot down by soldiers, some of the bodies nearly picked clean of flesh. But he knew the dead man in his parents’ bedroom wouldn’t be the last dead person he would see now that the world had changed. He knew he needed to toughen up and get stronger. And to do that, he was going to have to expose himself to death and face it.

  He used to play a video game with Eric, the kid down the street. They played a zombie game about the world turning into a wasteland—a game his mom would never allow him to play at home. Mike knew that soon this world, the real world, would look just like the world in that video game. Mike wanted to survive in this new world, and he wanted his dad and Emma to survive, and to do that, he knew he would have to be more of a help.

  At the top of the stairs, Mike opened the door and slipped out. He closed the door as quietly as he could. He stood there for a minute, listening for any noises in the house. He knew his dad was up here somewhere, but he couldn’t hear him. He looked back at the door to the basement, listening and making sure Emma hadn’t woken up and was calling out for him. If he would’ve heard her at that moment, he would’ve gone right back down there no matter how badly he wanted to see Craig and his family.

  But Emma didn’t call out, and he couldn’t hear his father anywhere in the house.

  This wouldn�
��t take long. His plan was to hurry through the laundry room to the garage. He would only be in there for a few minutes, just long enough to see . . . well, he wasn’t really sure what he wanted to see, just that he felt like he needed to. It almost felt like he was daring himself to do this.

  Mike entered the laundry room and closed the door behind him. He saw the heavy washer and dryer in front of the door that they’d come through last night. The room was cold with that little pane of glass broken out in the exterior door. Mike walked over to the dryer and looked out through the glass panes in the door. It was snowing out there, just a light dusting. Flurries swirled in the air. Their SUV was covered with a thin layer of snow, and Mike was sure there was snow inside the back of the SUV now that the back window was gone.

  He turned his attention to the door that led into the garage. He reached for the doorknob, twisted it, and opened the door.

  CHAPTER 39

  Ray stared at the wall of Craig’s office for a moment, staring at the painting that hung there—a painting of roses.

  Could that be it?

  He was in front of the painting a few seconds later, pulling it off the wall with trembling hands. He turned it over and saw a white notecard taped to the back of it.

  Ray brought the painting to the sofa and set it down with the back facing him and that little white notecard secured to it. He peeled the two pieces of Scotch tape away, trying to be careful, and then the card was free. He turned it over and saw writing: For Ray. The password to my laptop is: 8*611226390a.

  He felt a moment of elation and victory, he felt justified in risking all of their lives in coming here. Even if Craig had been turning, he had left his password on the back of this painting, so there had to be something on his computer that he wanted him to see. Ray also felt a feeling he hadn’t felt in what seemed like such a long time, a feeling he was afraid he would never feel again—hope.